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And the toilet has a dozen buttons and two knows to adjust seat and water temperature.

YMMV depending on where you go, but I only saw toilets with washlets in hotels and in the restrooms of few restaurants. Most that I saw were as simple as the standard U.S. model, expect for having "small" and "large" flush options -- a brilliant, simple idea that we should all adopt. And you will still find the simple squat type in many places. (Learn how to use 'em, and learn the kanji for "man" and "woman", and you'll be much better equipped for a trip to smaller towns or the countryside, where you won't find Western toilets or the standard international graphics at the restrooms.)

there's an english link but for the lazy. http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/index_e.html

does anyone else remember this already being on mac? I specifically remember downloading a D compiler plugin for XCode. It had a package and everything. I just never did anything with it. Also, it is what many Doshin shooters are written in. Epecially the ones written with BulletML. Many of these are crossplatform http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/

That link you posted had a bunch of Windows specific stuff (including XNA code, which even most Windows devs I know dislike because of the extreme lock-in it creates). The claims are that TUMIKI Fighters is for Windows, too, absolutely no mention of anything Linux or Open Source anywhere on the page. The game is in the Ubuntu repos, but it's odd that there's no mention of it.

I'll put this here, since these are kind of arcadey games.

ABA games has a number of free arcade shooters that are tons of fun to play. Most of them are available in Debian's repository, so they should be available on Ubuntu too. You can get windows binaries at that link. In particular, check out rRootage, Torus Trooper, and Tumiki Fighters. But they're all excellent games.

Probably everyone here knows about Kenta Cho, but in case you don't:

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/index_e.html

These are 2d retro games. But the level of creativity is astounding. I found some of them to be a bit weird, but others are total gems. Mu-cade has got to be my favorite. It took me a long time to get into it, but once I did I realized how deep this game is. You can literally spend 10s of hours devising new strategies. And the games generally last less than 5 minutes which means that it's great for people who don't have all day to game.

That was supposed to be:

The best free games I've found in a while are Shmups from ABA games. Most of them have linux packages, and the windows versions work great in wine too. Fast paced, colorful, intense arcade shooters, it doesn't get much better than this. Go play Torus Trooper and tell me your jaw doesn't drop.

I should learn to preview.

The best free games I've found in a while are Shmups from . Most of them have linux packages, and the windows versions work great in wine too. Fast paced, colorful, intense arcade shooters, it doesn't get much better than this. Go play Torus Trooper and tell me your jaw doesn't drop.

Since this seems to be the thread that's NOT about "buy a console", "play console roms", or "hide the sausage" I'll add my recommendations here:

Competitive PC games:
1) Fighters: Get MUGEN (and its infinite supply of custom characters/stages/mods/etc) There are Linux and Windows ports and clones of various levels of actually working-ness. I think the WinMUGEN port is probably the best supported. In modern times, pretty much the only PC fighters are Japanese, some of them have translations out there but might be tough to get legally (play-asia, paletweb, a few other sites exist for imports).
2) Sports: Looks like people still make multiplayer football/soccer/etc games for the PC. These are all going to be Windows games (might work in Wine)
3) Puzzle Games: Frozen Bubble and a billion others out there have competitive modes.

Co-operative PC games (because rubbing it in when you win is likely to mean you'll be rubbing one out on your own tonight):
1) Puzzle games: even if you can't find a co-operative tetris clone, there's always Shoulder Surfer Solitaire... if you can stand it ;)
2) Shoot-em-ups: almost all work with gamepads. A lot of them DO have two player co-op modes, but most of the freely available ones are single player. http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/gr_e.html has a two-player gamepad mode. I've successfully built this guy's C games on Linux with a few Makefile tweaks, haven't tried porting the games he wrote in D.

There exists an excellent essay by James Michener on the values of a liberal arts education over a technical one. I think its arguments are relevant to your case: http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~xs3d-bull/michener.html

It is granted that the year is no longer 1962, and Michener never did any computer science (that I know of). Still, read it.

Those are primarily the games that were both popular and groundbreaking.

There are games that are "artistic" and groundbreaking on a much deeper level, if you look hard enough. This is a good place to start.

And as much as I enjoyed Half-Life, the level plot wasn't *quite* where it needed to be to compete with a serious film or piece of literature. Damn close, though.

RPGs (Planescape Torment jumps out, as do many of the Final Fantasy games) also tend to have fantastic "artistic" visuals, great storylines, and good music.

If you like the way this game looks, try the games made by Kenta Cho, for example rrootage : http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/rr_e.html

There are linux ports of them here : http://rrootage.sourceforge.net/

They are pretty addictive, have joystick/gamepad support and pretty good music.

Enjoy.

Why no mention of great FOSS games?

Because naming a recent difficult game would force them to accept that people do in fact still make difficult games and that they don't all dumb it down to the lowest common denominator.

For an example, take Noiz2sa (source code can be compiled on Linux with a few tweaks), a curtain-fire shooter where even the bullets shoot bullets.

Shmups are a popular indie genre in Japan, at least 50% of the indie ("dojin") games are shmups. Some are freeware like Kenta Cho's games, Cho Ren Sha and Galax. For the rest you can go through Palet or Himeya (Dojin section), look for games in the catalog and paste the name of the game or developer into Google, often there are playable demos available.

1)Noone is using any of those 3 languages, anywhere.

If a tree falls in a forest and you're not there to hear it fall, doesn't mean it doesn't make a sound.
a few people in some places != no one anywhere

Some of my favorite games are programmed in D.
Check out: Kenta Cho's abstract shootemup games for an example.
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/index_e.html

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tf_e. html

TUMIKI Fighters should have been on that list

I've no personal experience using D, but indie-gaming darling Kenta Cho has been using it for years to make some of the most acclaimed free games on the net.

I didn't care for Geometry Wars, though I only played Grid Wars 2. I do wonder what would happen if Microsoft released this Japanese Guy's stuff on XLA. Parsec47 is one of my favorite shoot'em ups and you can beat the price he charges.

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/index_e.html

Why bother to torture yourself with the headaches presented by Linux gaming? Why should you continually not have the games you want to play? Why settle for half-assed solutions that might or might not run the games you crave so desperately?"

Why bother to torture yourself with the headaches presented by Linux gaming? Why should you continually not have the games you want to play? Why settle for half-assed solutions that might or might not run the games you crave so desperately?"

Most everything is high-tech, including the john. That is if you've got a western-style toilet. Many of the nice places automatically turn on a seat warmer and exhaust fan as soon as you sit down, and there are a number of buttons there which spray jets of water at your anus to wash it, and some others that I'm afraid to try... However, if you have one of them Japanese-style toilets, God help you if you need to take a dump...

I remember an Asteroid PD clone where you moved the character with one joystick and with the other joystick you controlled the fire beam

Hold on a sec. CoD2, Oblivion, and Tomb Raider are all available on PC (Tomb Raider being availble on all the consoles). Wik is also availble on PC. Geometry wars can be supplanted by this guy (and all those are opensourced). Kameo isn't all that different from what Rare did in the N64 days.

I don't own a High-def TV, so my 3.5-year-old PC can basically match the graphical output of the 360. The games so far have basically been Xbox++, with higher-def textures. The games I listed at the top pretty much shoot down your argument that there's a super 360-only library. What I'm saying here is that there isn't much of an argument for me to spend $400.

Except for Table Tennis. That game looks amazing. And not because of the graphics.

MiniAim I mean, seriously. How can you go wrong with an 80Kb aim client?
uTorrent - Works better then the normal BitTorrent client.
ABAGames - Pretty much any one of these shooters is worth playing.

And it looks like all the other really obvious stuff has been mentioned. I also reccommend checking out an Ubuntu LiveDisk... As soon as Dapper hits the streets, this laptop will be booting Linux.

I have a few gigabytes of games that offer quick gameplay and aren't available on the Mac. From an old list I compiled for an earlier thread:

Cho Ren Sha 68k (shmup)
Kenta Cho's games (mostly shmups)
Destruction Desire (fighting game)
Mind Arms (fighting game)
Galax (Shmup)
Doukutsu Monogatari (platformer)
Every Extend (kamikaze'em up)
Glace (platformer)
Frontline (sidescrolling shooter)
Minebot (... Action?)

...if null_functor learns D well (and|but) decides to quit (his|her) job, (s)he can make a kick-ass game with it.

Do yourself a favor and get some of Kenta Cho's shooters. Not only beautiful, but also BSD licensed and ported to GNU/Linux and OS X (but I don't have the link handy).

Someone already mentioned Kenta Cho, but I just want to make absolutely sure you follow it up. His stuff absolutely rules, it is exactly what you're looking for, and free.

Go here, download, love.

p.s. Picking up a dreamcast (approximate cost $0.01) might also be good for you if you don't mind a little warezing. Ikaruga, Giga Wing 1+2, and quite a few more, all available on a good torrent site as straight ISO images.

1. Shmups are about the action. Some are about reacting quickly, some are about carefully maneuvering a huge mess of bullets and some are about performing a dance with steps you have to find out by trial and error (R-Type anyone?). They are never about finding some super-kill-everything weapon. Well, the japanese shmups aren't, anyway. In western shmups you'll often have to upgrade your weapon to insane levels to kill even the smallest enemies in later levels (Tyrian and Raptor, for example). Superweapons are sometimes only good for clearing out bullets, in some games they don't even do damage. Cho Ren Sha or rRootage are popular vertical shmups and pretty representative of what the genre is like these days.

2. IMO the hardest V-shmup ever is Radio Zonde. The default setting is infinite lives and you'll have to change that in the options menu (or select a character other than the two you can see on screen). I've never made it past the first level. I've seen videos of other games that claim to be harder but those are usually at high difficulty. Radio Zonde is impossible at normal (easiest) difficulty.

3. Ikaruga was an arcade game. What are they supposed to do, butcher the game to make it more home console friendly? Most arcade fans want arcade-perfect ports.

Now that's news!

A solid innovative product that people actually want to buy helps a company turn a profit!

Now if only the rest of the gaming industry (I'm talking to you, EA!) would catch up, we might be able to escape the FPS monotony we've fallen into.

It seems that the popularity of a game is solely determined by the level of hype surrounding it. Halo specifically comes to mind. I'll concede that it's a solid FPS, but the level of hype surrounding the launch of Halo 2 was obscene.

I'm sorry, but there are just so many things about the gaming industry that irritate me. The companies. Overinflated prices. Overinflated gamer egos. Lack of innovation. Hype. Obscene system requirements.....

Here's what I've been playing in the past year:
-More SNES/N64 games than you can shake a stick at. I'll probably buy a gamecube because Nintendo's games seem to have the greatest degree of innovation/replayability right now (and yet they're the least popular, go figure)
-Liero (hailing all the way from 1993)
-All of these downright bizarre arcade-style shooters that are strangely addictive
-Wulfram. One of the first good online games back from 2000. It's finally being actively developed once again...
-Darwinia. Another great non-photorealistic game. (Could be better to tell the truth, but a solid game nonetheless)
-Escape Velocity Series -- they've been around forever for the mac. A few have been ported to Windows. Go see what the PC world has been missing out on for over a decade!
-Freespace 2 -- One of the best space shooters ever made. Period. Made by a major studio, but enjoyed little commercial success. I can't even begin to fathom why....

Small, indy games exist and are a lot of fun...
For example the games here (free):
Aba games
Hizoka Chi's games
Or Cave Story, japanese indy game translated by fans.

Or various other indy games such as Ballance or Chronic Logic's games, or CrimsonLand.

Ofcourse, hardly anyone ever heard about these games, but it doesn't mean they don't rock. Just download the demos and see for yourself. None of these games are "GTA, Halo or Everquest clones", but rather truly original ideas (playing a ball??) or fun ideas that somewhere disappeared (shooters, platformers)...

I should keep the list somewhere...

Cho Ren Sha 68k (shmup)
Kenta Cho's games (mostly shmups)
Destruction Desire (fighting game)
Mind Arms (fighting game)
Galax (Shmup)
Frequon Invaders (weird)
Doukutsu Monogatari (platformer)
Every Extend (kamikaze'em up)
Glace (platformer)
Frontline (sidescrolling shooter)
Minebot (... Action?)
N (Platformer)

"If you like, you can download free games from the Net right now, which are graphically unimpressive and just plain crap."

Zetrix - http://www.wintotal.de/softw/index.php?rb=63&id=93 6

Tumiki Fighters - http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tf_e. html

Torus Trooper - http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tt_e. html

There are good free games out there, if you look for them.

Flamebait.

"If you like, you can download free games from the Net right now, which are graphically unimpressive and just plain crap."

Zetrix - http://www.wintotal.de/softw/index.php?rb=63&id=93 6

Tumiki Fighters - http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tf_e. html

Torus Trooper - http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tt_e. html

There are good free games out there, if you look for them.

Flamebait.

You see, citing a study which supports your opinion means nothing. What you have to do is look at a number of studies which come to different conclusions and show that the ones that support your view are in some way more reliable than the others. Neither of us, needless to say, has risen to that level.

Obviously, there is a problem with criminals having access to guns, which is why so many people feel they, too, need a gun for self-defense. But this is a vicious cycle: FBI Crime Reports sources indicate that there are about 340,000 reported firearms thefts every year. Those guns, the overwhelming amount of which were originally manufactured and purchased legally, and now in the hands of criminals. Thus, the old credo "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" is silly. What happens is many guns bought legally are sold or stolen, and can then be used for crime. If those 340,000 guns were never sold or owned in the first place, that would be 340,000 less guns in the hands of criminals every year. Part of the reason there are so many guns on the street in the hands of criminals is precisely because so many are sold legally. Certainly, there will always be a way to obtain a gun illegally. But if obtaining a gun legally is extremely difficult, the price of illegal guns goes way up, and availability goes way down. Thus, it is much more difficult for criminals to obtain guns.

So you see, given the fact that people who study this issue professionally can't agree, it's not particularly impressive that you can find some study supporting your views. The Wikipedia talk page on gun politics notes the conclusion of the National Acedemy of Sciences:

"The committee found that answers to some of the most pressing questions cannot be addressed with existing data and research methods, however well designed; for example, despite a large body of research, the committee found no credible evidence that the passage of right-to-carry laws decreases or increases violent crime, and there is almost no empirical evidence that the more than 80 prevention programs focused on gun-related violence have had any effect on children's behavior, knowledge, attitudes, or beliefs about firearms. The committee found that the data available on these questions are too weak to support unambiguous conclusions or strong policy statements. ... Nevertheless, many of the shortcomings described in this report stem from the lack of reliable data itself rather than the weakness of methods."

What the....?

This is not your server, and this is not your account on that server, either.

Granted, you never claimed that they were, but others have assumed as much based on the way you worded your post.

Besides, these videos have been getting hammered by the entire nation of Japan since this past Sunday. games.slashdot.org can do nothing to take down these files.

What the....?

This is not your server, and this is not your account on that server, either.

Granted, you never claimed that they were, but others have assumed as much based on the way you worded your post.

Besides, these videos have been getting hammered by the entire nation of Japan since this past Sunday. games.slashdot.org can do nothing to take down these files.

Also available:

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/umd/fly_003.a vi
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/umd/fly_005.a vi
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/umd/fly_006.a vi

One with a different game, one from a different angle, one looks the same as _004

Also available:

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/umd/fly_003.a vi
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/umd/fly_005.a vi
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/umd/fly_006.a vi

One with a different game, one from a different angle, one looks the same as _004

Also available:

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/umd/fly_003.a vi
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/umd/fly_005.a vi
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/umd/fly_006.a vi

One with a different game, one from a different angle, one looks the same as _004

heres a video

and another, this time attacking a teddybear

and yet another, of a psps assaulting a defenseless nintendo ds!

this guy cracks me up.

heres a video

and another, this time attacking a teddybear

and yet another, of a psps assaulting a defenseless nintendo ds!

this guy cracks me up.

heres a video

and another, this time attacking a teddybear

and yet another, of a psps assaulting a defenseless nintendo ds!

this guy cracks me up.

UMD Guillotine o' Death

Now if somebody with more bandwidth than me wants to mirror it... Pretty please!

(1) Square button's problem
It makes a creaking noise and stucks
because there is a gap between the button and its rubber (and, of course, the board)
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/controller/ka nbotsu_001.jpg
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/controller/ka nbotsu_genin_002.jpg

(3) Power failure and/or Chip defect
Power indicator light illuminates, but...
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/system/power_ 001.mpg

(1) Square button's problem
It makes a creaking noise and stucks
because there is a gap between the button and its rubber (and, of course, the board)
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/controller/ka nbotsu_001.jpg
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/controller/ka nbotsu_genin_002.jpg

(3) Power failure and/or Chip defect
Power indicator light illuminates, but...
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/system/power_ 001.mpg

(1) Square button's problem
It makes a creaking noise and stucks
because there is a gap between the button and its rubber (and, of course, the board)
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/controller/ka nbotsu_001.jpg
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/controller/ka nbotsu_genin_002.jpg

(3) Power failure and/or Chip defect
Power indicator light illuminates, but...
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/system/power_ 001.mpg

(2) Flying Disk System (design error and/or manufacturing defect)
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/umd/fly_004.a vi
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/umd/fly_005.a vi

(2) Flying Disk System (design error and/or manufacturing defect)
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/umd/fly_004.a vi
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cf6y-oot/umd/fly_005.a vi